Biden said workers would earn high wages to prepare for climate change under his resilience plan.
The president's Build Back Better proposal includes jobs that pay "$45 or $50 an hour," he said.
He added that the plan would return $6 in savings for each dollar invested to prevent disaster.
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Jobs that help prepare the US for the changing climate will pay a high hourly wage, President Joe Biden said after touring storm damage in New York and New Jersey on Tuesday.
"I think of one word when I think of climate change: jobs, good-paying jobs," he said. "Not $7 or $12 or $15, but $45, $50 an hour, plus healthcare. That's what is needed."
Biden's $45 figure is more than six times higher than the Federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which has remained unchanged since 2009, when Biden was vice president in the Obama administration.
Businesses are increasingly finding it difficult to attract talent by offering less than $15 an hour, making that a de facto minimum wage in some instances.
Biden described increased spending on climate resilience as a smart investment, saying that each dollar invested under his Build Back Better plan in things like flood mitigation, forest-fire prevention, and burying electrical lines would ultimately lead to $6 in savings.
"The storm in the Gulf, as you've now figured out, can reverberate 10 states away," he said. "Supply chains and crop production get interrupted, driving up costs, devastating industries all over America. This is everybody's crisis."
Tripti Bhattacharya, an environmental-science professor at Syracuse University, told NPR that Ida had "just the right mix of weather conditions" in place to wreak havoc across the Northeast more than 1,000 miles from where it made landfall in Louisiana.
"A storm like this would have been exceptionally rare 20 or 50 years ago, but we have to start thinking about it becoming the norm as the climate warms," she said.
Against that backdrop, Biden is pitching his multitrillion-dollar spending plan as a win-win in both economic terms and, more importantly, lives saved.
"It's serious, serious business," he said. "We got a lot of work to do."
therealowlman on September 8th, 2021 at 23:31 UTC »
I mean, he’s right 100% to focus on this.
Green energy transformation is about protecting our environment from climate change but also the ONLY way to maintain economic prosperity this century.
Either we do it first, or we fall behind and play catch up with the rest of the world.
If we run on renewable energy we don’t need fucking oil and gas industry to soak up the value in our economy.
Cheaper energy will drive up our productivity and gdp long term.
Cleaner energy will slow the accelerating affects of climate change (which have massive financial burdens long term)
Energy independence means we don’t need to keep toxic relationships with authoritarian regimes over their natural resources and empower terrorism just to maintain our status as the leading economy either.
Ozy-Man-D on September 8th, 2021 at 18:54 UTC »
America actually had really good factory jobs in the 60's, 70's, 80's and going into the 90's. So everyone wasn't competing for all the same type of jobs. A lot of those jobs didn't require college or even a lot of experience. And some did. So those job opportunities allowed a lot of people to prosper. Not to mention the wages were pretty good.
Allowing those jobs to leave the Country really impacted our employment opportunities. Pumping money into changing climate control and infrastructure will definitely help with employment.
Dull_Tonight on September 8th, 2021 at 17:55 UTC »